The Sunhunter Series
by Euregatto
Summary: 3/24: 'You can't have him,' she thinks, her refusal a potent venom in her mind, 'he is mine.' [Eren x Annie] - A collection of one shots for Ereannie week. Rating: high teen
1. First Time

**A/N**: A series of one shots I publish for Ereannie week!

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**Day 1/8**

First time

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It's almost impossible to see through the dark shrouding the field beneath the plateau. The abyssal sky is cloaked in thick clouds, ignited with flares of lightning and rumbling with mighty bursts of thunder. Eren Jaeger inhales the damp air, tasting the impending storm on his tongue as he leans his shoulder into the rifle's stock, his forefinger curling around the trigger, squinting into the night vision scope.

It's their platoon's second mission, his first out in the field.

"Don't be nervous," the intrepid voice beside him remarks, as frigid as the thin layer of frost settled beneath them despite the warmth in her breath as it fans the back of his neck. It is ever present and unnaturally _alive_, somewhat inhuman, partially omnipotent.

He thinks that this girl is more dangerous than what they're hunting. She could curls her fingers around his throat and strangle him so easily he wouldn't have a chance to fight back, leaving him here in the Outlands. It's almost funny how small she is in comparison, but she's lethal, he's seen it; witnessed her floor the biggest guy in their squad like he was an incompetent child.

Suddenly he doesn't like the idea of being out here with her, alone in the dark of the Outlands, almost like the last year of training in the same recruit platoon has had the same effect as shaking hands with a complete and charming stranger.

He could radio out to the half of his squad that stayed behind to track the search groups from behind the safety of the Wall in the Command center, just like he had done during the first mission, but she could use her combat knife, and slice open his voice box with the flick of her wrist. The several other pairs of soldiers roaming the Outlands could find him, if they bothered to look.

He doesn't know why he's more intimidated by her than by their real enemy.

In retrospect, she is his friend, they've made that clear as a baseline minimum. Of course – when he briefly glances over to meet her gaze – he can see the strange thrill burning behind her eyes like sapphire embers, and it bothers him. She's enjoying this. _How twisted_.

"Relax," she whispers as soothingly as before, shifting a little closer to him so her chest is pressed almost completely up against his side. He guides his eye back to the scope to avoid looking at her. "Focus, Eren."

A suppressed tingle creeps down his spine. He swallows dryly, not at her but at the jerking object in his line of sight. "It's my first time," he informs her, because she was chosen to go out on the last mission while he was selected to stay at Command.

"I know. Just breathe." Her gloved fingers trace the stitching of his coat, across the expanse of his hips. "I only killed three myself last time. It's not that bad."

"But it's a person," he tells her insistently, the bulls eye of his scope connecting with the swaying forehead of the figure in the field.

"It isn't alive anymore. It's not a person, it's just a corpse."

He grits his teeth. He knows that. Everyone knows that.

"I thought you wanted to kill them all, Jaeger?" she purrs into his ear, mocking the dream he had declared the first day during recruitment, nipping suggestively at his earlobe with her front teeth like she's going to devour him alive. Just like those damn monsters. Honestly, he would rather they got to him first. "Especially after they killed your poor mother when you were just a child?"

"Fuck off," he hisses, hot and bothered by her typical psychological bullshit. She hums against the base of his skull, her knee gradually rubbing up the length of his thigh. "_Ah_ – For fuck's _sake_ Annie, how am I supposed to do this if you're distracting me?"

"If you're too chicken shit to pull the trigger, I'll have to do it for you."

At the sound of crashing thunder overhead Eren immediately fires, the resounding explosion of gun powder muffles by the natural roaring in the void, and the bullet streamlines through the air with an acute, descending whistle. The skull of the shambling body snaps back against the force, before the limbs jerk violently and the torso falls limply to the grass. "There," Eren grumbles, but a victorious smile has settled in his features, "not bad for a first shot."

Annie smiles against his shoulder. "Feels good, doesn't it?"

"Bite me. _You_ can get off on this, but I'm not anything like you." He means it – she's being sadistic, cruel, and belittling, just as her last mission partner had mentioned, and if he doesn't watch her her hands might end up between the heat of her own legs.

Her finger tips slide along the length of his cheek. "And what am I then, Eren, if not a human like you? A monster like _them_?"

"_Annie_," he stresses when he hears the slight crack in her normally undeterred tone, "I didn't mean it like _that_. I meant that you and I are – _Sina dammit_, it doesn't matter. I'm sorry, alright? Just let it go."

The duo of blazing blue orbs spears him with a calculated glare. He shudders, distracts himself by turning his attention into the scope once more. "Don't brush it off Jaeger, tell me what you really meant. I'm curious."

"You're not _curious_," he shoots back, spotting another shambling corpse several yards away from the one he previously gunned down. "You're just trying to provoke me. I don't know what your problem is but you can't play your weird mind games with me." He pulls the trigger but the bullet shreds through the wheat stalks, completely bypassing the rotted corpse's head. "_Shit_."

"Who said I was?"

"Is this because it's your birthday and no one got you a fucking gift?"

Annie draws back from him, furrowing her brow quizzically, and he doesn't have to look at her to know he's hit the right nerve. Thunder grumbles overhead once more, illuminating the back of her head like a broken halo of heavenly light. "You… _remembered_? But you can barely recall how to lace up your own boots."

"Of course I remembered your _birthday_, Annie." He shrugs passively, realigning the marker with the creature's forehead. "First of all, for the record, I can tie my own damn boots just fine. Secondly, I was going to surprise you with your gift, but since you're obviously having emotional trauma over the lack of distributed attention, you can have the cursed thing now. It's in the left – _OOF!_"

She throws him onto his back, not hard but suddenly, her arms around his waist and her lips melding perfectly with his. He hums in surprise, melting against her familiar touch, the growling ebbing into a satisfied moan. She breaks off so she can tuck her head into the crook of his neck. "No one's ever remembered," she mutters, kicking her legs into the air almost childishly, "but at least this one doesn't suck anymore."

Eren scoffs under his breath, fishing out the necklace from his pocket. Despite the grime and muck it resembles a circle. Like a sun, because her hair reminds him of the sunlight they rarely see anymore. "I looted it from that dead corpse we saw on the way here."

"How romantic," she chides with a furtive eye roll. She accepts the grimy necklace and wipes the front with her jacket sleeve, revealing the flattened sapphire stone in the center of the gold circle. "You think it's worth anything?"

"Maybe if it's real."

She tucks it away into her breast pocket. "What do you say we keep shooting? Maybe we'll find something else on the other bodies. The fuckers don't need any of it, right?"

_Looting reanimated corpses isn't exactly a birthday party theme I'd care to indulge in_, he ponders, but he just smiles instead. There's a first time for everything.

"Anything for the birthday girl."


	2. Keepsake

**A/N**: Almost didn't produce this in time. Whew.

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**Day 2/8**

Keepsake

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"Knew I'd find you here."

In the archway of the entrance to the supply room Eren's silhouette takes form. Behind him the trainees are bustling about, passing from one point to another in the background, and if Annie strains to hear, she can pick up on the panic settling comfortably amongst them. She's at a table loading gas tanks into her gear, snapping the pins into place and setting her triggers, so she doesn't bother to glance up to meet his verdant gaze.

"Here?" she muses, threading the gear into her belt clips.

"Y'know, where everyone else isn't."

She fumbles trying to clip on the gear's stabilizer to her belt's back most loop. "Well, I won't be here for long. There's a massacre waiting for us outside that Wall." The clip misses her loop again. "Son of a _bitch,_ I hate these things."

He steps up to her, moving around the table to stand behind her. He coaxes her hands away and slides the stabilizer into place, tightening her straps with several firm tugs, and locking the canisters into place. His fingertips ghost against the curves of her hips, his torrid breath fans across the back of her pallid neck when he leans too close. "A massacre," he echoes, "for us, or for them?"

"Give me the realistic answer."

"Them."

"_Eren_," she stresses, leaning back against him so he can wind his arms around her shoulders and her waist, "we're expendables. Most of us aren't even ready for this, and if we're lucky, maybe _half_ of our top ten will live through the night. Whether you want to accept it or not, we're all going to die." She reaches up to grasp his forearm, clutching the cuff of his jacket. "You know that."

He brushes her bangs from her face, tucking them behind her ear, pressing his lips to her golden locks. His fingers are gliding down the arch of her cheek, along her jawline, under her chin so she's tilting her head up to look at him. Her gaze is unusually soft, and for once it does not remind him of the winter frost, but instead of the summer sky. "I don't want to lose any one else, especially someone I care about."

"Should have thought about that before you joined the corps."

"That's _why_ I joined."

She turns to face him, allowing her slender fingers to grasp the back of his neck, and she guides him down to meet her. He melds against her perfectly, one hand on her cheek, the other her hip, pressing his tongue through her parted lips as she grants him entry. He's hot and timid and _alive_, not for long but just for now, and that's more than enough for her.

A moment later she breaks off, her mouth swelled from the kiss – she's watching him with a whisper of a smirk in her normally stoic expression. "What was that?" he asks, dumbfounded.

"A keepsake. Something to remember me by."

He grits his teeth, his grasp on her tightening almost possessively. "_Annie_, you're not going to-!"

"You don't know that." She laughs gently, hollowed and void of any humor, almost sarcastic. "Because if you did, there'd be nothing to fight for."


	3. Monster

**A/N**: Got this done with ten minutes to spare. Probably more enjoyable if you read on tumblr or on archive of our own.

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**Day 3/8**

Monster

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She's somewhere in the forest, her body tucked up against the center bulk of a collapsed, withered tree, her hands over her ears to quell the noises. It's too dark to see in any direction, she'll find her way home in the morning, when she has the renewed strength to move – to fight off the voices, to regain her composure and her sanity.

**_You killed them._**

**_Murderer._**

**_Monster._**

She feels like she's trapped in her own body, clawing at the cages of her chest, desperately screaming for someone to save her when the monster is devouring her. It has taken so much from her already – her innocence, her childhood, her sanity and her reason – but there's something that she won't let it have. _Him_, it cannot have _him_, the only good thing she still has left in her delusional world.

**_What would he think if he knew?_**

**_He would hate you._**

**_Like they all will._**

**_Give him to me._**

She presses her palms down until her ears are screaming with pain. _You can't have him_, she thinks, her refusal a potent venom in her mind, _he is mine_.

_Mine._

_I claimed him._

**_Annie._**

_Mine._

**_Annie._**

"Annie?"

She goes rigid as the familiar voice quells her untamed cyclone of thoughts.

"Annie, what are you doing out here? It's too cold!"

That's just like him to be so concerned for a monster like me. 'Get lost' she tries to tell him, but it feels like she's choking on shards of glass and her words fail to meet the air. Her heart is hammering in her chest like strikes of thunder, singing her lips as she stutters, burning through her system and blowing her nerves out until she is numb to the ever frigid ground beneath her. "_Please don't hate me._"

"Hate you?" he retorts, clearly taken aback. "Annie, you're delirious."

When she gazes into his eyes she can see it – the world, the verdant forest and the mountains and the hopes – she can see his dreams, his ideals, his baneful existence. It's so beautiful to her. She wishes she could fade into the moss and let the earth consume her, ensnaring her in fingers of crippled roots and blankets of decaying leaves. All she wants to do is be with him, where she knows it's safe.

But it's when she looks at him that the monster tries to steal him from her. "You're going to hate me, _just like everyone else_."

His touch has always been gentle, a little timid despite the festering anger fueling his every breath, even as he brings the back of his hand to her forehead. "You're a little warm." – _I'm always warm_, she wants to say – "Let me take you to the infirmary."

"There's no point!" She exclaims, shoving him by the forearm but subsequently straining her too tired body. She falls back down, not even realizing she had been gradually compelling herself to her feet, and he guides her against his chest, enclosing her in his arms. "The monster is going to take you from me," she whispers into his shoulder, "and you're going to hate me."

"_Seriously_," he hisses as he adjusts her properly in his lap, "you're a wreck."

"_Mm_…" she hums, her head lolling absently against his shoulder, picking up on the sound of his drumming heart. "You're so _gentle_… your heart is so strong."

He scoffs humorlessly. "You're talking out of your ass. Come on, I'm taking you to the infirmary ward."

"I'm fine," she says sharply – lying through her teeth, just like every other time before – and grasping the front of his jacket to keep him locked in place. "I'm fine… Just – please, Eren, _hold me_." She winds her arms around his back, fingers possessively clutching the fabric of his shirt, relaxing into his captivating touch as his grasp tightens, not too hard, perfectly. The voices in her head are gradually stopping, her pulse stilling, her tears dripping down her cheeks in rivulets.

"I could never hate you, Annie." He kisses her forehead, her cheek, her lips. "_I would never_."

_Liar, _she thinks bitterly, _but for now… "Just hold me."_

And he does.


End file.
